Film – Our Helper / Film – náš pomocník is a carefully curated four-disk DVD collection of short public information films made in the former Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1959. The collection was released in 2015 to coincide with a book of essays (in Czech only) on the same subject, also called Film – náš pomocník and edited by Lucie Česalková, who was chiefly responsible for assembling the films here.
The timeframe covered represents Czechoslovakia’s first decade of state-socialist rule, a period spanning from optimistic inauguration through the traumatic years of high Stalinism to the cautious relaxation of the late 1950s. What film “helped” do during these years was to accommodate the public to new realities, in the wake of war and in the midst of tumultuous political, social, economic and technological transformations. Czechoslovak citizens had much to learn about new ways of living and working, from the benefits of universal healthcare to the demands of an expanding, ever more rationalised industry. There were dietary regulations and defence procedures to absorb and adopt – new methods of safeguarding the body and the nation. Of course, the films that were made did not merely educate: they were also intended to promote and persuade. Česálková, in the informative introduction that she wrote for the accompanying booklet, describes these films as primarily “exhortative”, concerned with promoting “new ideals of citizenship” and “mobilis[ing]” active support for socialist society (p. 3).
It would be too simplistic to dismiss this output, even at its most ideological, as merely state propaganda. Yet these films clearly were primarily state-determined exercises, produced in order to serve the Czechoslovak government’s current “policy priorities”. The films were generally produced at the Kratký film [Short Film] studio, but if a ministry or other state institution was involved in financing a film, it would exercise direct and extensive control over the production, from script collaboration to deciding on the length or choice of film material (p. 4).
References to social transformation, political exhortation and state control inevitably evoke communist (and specifically Stalinist) rule, with its ruthless remoulding of society, its utopian rhetoric and its cultural instrumentalism. But as Česalková reminds us – quoting a 1947 statement from journalist Otakar Maršík – Czechoslovakia’s immediate post-war, pre-communist government had its own agenda of transformation and progress to sell, in the form of its 1947-48 two-year plan, and it was already exploiting the wide reach and persuasive power of cinema. The use of film as a means of education and mobilisation was of course also evident in non-communist countries: my native Britain, for instance, established its own idiosyncratic tradition of public information films while implementing the more modest post-war progressivism of the welfare state (see BFI 2013-14).
Given this earlier, pre-Stalinist provenance of the public information film in Czechoslovakia, it made sense here to include films from the late 1940s – films that, even when completed after the February 1948 Communist takeover, came too early to fall properly under the grip of the political and aesthetic orthodoxies that mark the years 1950-54. In this period Czechoslovak society was aggressively yoked to the fulfillment of the first five-year plan. In 1950, Česalková notes, Kratký film was itself reorganised. This collection invaluably highlights continuities between the Stalinist and pre-Stalinist periods, in attitudes towards the role of film as well as in actual political content.
Public information films are made neither to turn a profit nor to win critical admiration: as Česalková argues, they are hard to grasp from the dominant interpretive perspectives of “film as art” and “cinematography as business” (p. 4). The films in this collection have not been selected because they are the most artistically distinguished examples of this genre, but rather to form a representative and diverse sample of a ‘hybrid’ form of filmmaking that makes art and entertainment serve education and promotion. There are films here by directors who would become famous and critically lauded – František Vláčil, Ladislav Rychman, Jiří Menzel – but the general artistic anonymity of the works of these future name directors only helps illustrate the determining role of the cinematic (or state) institution, the primacy of well-entrenched conventions and tropes.
But this collection is certainly not without artistic or entertainment value. A number of the films here truly achieve that integration of the entertaining and the instructional, handling their informative (or pseudo-informative) content with both subtlety and aplomb, offering rousing cinematic thrills as well as understated humour. Elsewhere the films’ pedagogical aims stand out with a chalk-on-blackboard starkness, their tendentiousness unabashed. But from the most sophisticated to the crudest entries, almost all the films here are at least interesting, if only as an evocation of the ordinary Czechoslovak life of this period. That sense of real life may comprise the core informational content of a particular film, or it may be incidental to a film’s conscious purpose and sneak out from behind otherwise artificial presentation. The wide range of issues with which the selected films deal allows us a glimpse of many different aspects of post-war Czechoslovak reality, the topics explored stretching far beyond the expected concerns of this era of zealous socialist construction. Thus, alongside the collective farms and the military drills, we get folk music, fashion shows and handball contests.
The selected films have been divided into eight different broad themes, with two themes covered per disc: industry, agriculture, defence capability, sport, and so on. This certainly provides a convenient way to dip into this mass of material, and yet one’s impression in watching the whole set is of a constant connection, overlap and reiteration belying apparent thematic differences. The films dealing with sport and with defence are a particularly strong example of this interconnectedness. Sports contests bring the promise of peace while evoking righteous bellicosity: in the 1954 Emil Zátopek (Pavel Blumenfeld), a portrait of the eponymous running champion, sport is described as a “noble mission” that helps bring people together and foster internationalism, while Rošický Memorial 1954 depicts an annual track-and-field event held in honour of an executed resistance member – “an indefatigable fighter against fascism”. Conversely, though, sport features in the films about defence. In Sokolovo Contest of Defence Capability/Sokolovský závod branné zdatnosti (Jiří Mrázek, 1953), military exercises alternate with racing and skiing contests, and in the two-part Defence Education/Branná výchova, Oldřich Kříž, 1952), one of the most striking and eye-opening films in the collection, a group of children and youths engage in competitive defence practice and conduct an extended mock combat operation, which plays out as an upbeat, lyrical adventure in the countryside. If the films make the most of sport’s natural associations of combat and military-style discipline, defence preparation itself becomes a jaunty escapade, a kind of sport.
The sense one has of the films merging into one another of course bespeaks the context of a period preoccupied above all with reinforcing model socialist values and behaviour. Among the eight highlighted themes of the collection, one that is absent is work, though this may be because the importance of hard work is omnipresent here, uniting the multiple bodies and formations in a show of dedicated, disciplined activity and tying together the various specific topics. Leisure is valued for its physical benefits and curative properties, while the curative effects of spa treatment are in turn noted as a means to get people back to work.
Thus, the more lighthearted and less evidently socially engaged or ‘political’ subjects here do tend to get swept up into the earnest proclamation of state-socialist superiority. One example of this is the 1954 International Clothing Show/Mezinárodní přehlídka odívání (Josef Kořán), a fascinating and evocative entry with its parade of resolutely decorous fashion designs whose politically correct standards of efficiency and functionality are noted in the commentary. The ‘Soviet model’ extends even to fashion models as Soviet clothing design is touted for its inevitable superiority.
But this pressing of even the most innocuous topics into political service does not apply everywhere, and sometimes these topics can indeed seem like a conscious, blissful retreat from politics. One of the most charming films is Do You Play Handball?/Hrajete házenou? (František Lukáš, 1955), a dramatised guide to the titular Czech-invented sport that seems free from political import (besides straightforward national pride). Framed by a wise and still handy old former player who delivers a history of the sport before outshining his younger competitors in a practical demonstration, this film is like a gentle corrective to the romantic cult of youth and the utopian fixation on the future presented elsewhere. It features an unashamedly nostalgic and pastiche-like evocation of the past, using silent film-style undercranking to depict the old man’s reminiscences of the early twentieth century.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Stalinist discourse takes its most characteristic and full-fledged form in the selections dealing with agriculture and farming collectives, all of which date from the first half of the 1950s. Women in Agricultural Cooperatives/Ženy v JZD (Josef Soukup, 1951) offers a microcosm of ergonomic (and political) advancement, presenting a specific farming collective in which workers divide themselves into competitive groups that strive to best one another’s output (now it is work that becomes sport). In Beloved Guests/Hosté nejmilejší (Erna Friesová, 1951), the eponymous figures are a delegation of Soviet farmers who come to share their expertise at a cooperative in Mělnické Vtelno. Visually plain though they are, both these films gleam with the pleasure of work, the achievement of efficiency and the certainty of a happy future. Admittedly, the other, later agricultural films here grow more technically oriented and less ideologically overt. 1954’s Duck Farms/Kachní farmy (Miro Bernat), a factually straightforward study of duck-breeding filmed in colour and boasting some impressive underwater shots, is perhaps the most appealing, and certainly the least problematic, work in this section.
One may feel repulsed by the crude and propagandistic character of some of this material, a feeling compounded in these agriculture films by the knowledge that the films were utilised as persuasive tools in the imposition of enforced collectivisation. Women in Agricultural Cooperatives or Beloved Guests may clearly be judged risible for their idealised and insidious manipulation of reality, their conversion of state policy into the spontaneous initiatives of ‘the people’, and their use of native or folk culture as window-dressing around Sovietised obeisance. What is not risible, though, is such films’ positive representation of the active and autonomous role of women. While Women in Agricultural Cooperatives revolves precisely around the premise that it is the women who have revolutionised work at the cooperative, images of female independence and skill in ‘masculine’ areas appear elsewhere too: Sokolovo Contest of Defence Capability emphasises that the young women are the equal of their male peers in military tactics.
What is also of value, intellectual value at least, in the agriculture films is that they force us to think about where ‘neutral’ educative content ends and propaganda and proselytisation begin. This issue is at the forefront in How a Machine Helps People/Jak stroj pomáhá lidem (Rudolf Obdržálek, 1952) and In the Collective Stable/V družstevní stáji (Alois Neumann, 1953), both of which closely interweave the technical and the tendentious. How a Machine Helps People opens with a history of agricultural methods that seamlessly integrates reference to “the example of Soviet peasants” and to farming cooperatives as though these latter were part of the inevitable and inarguable peak of technological – as well as political – progress. In the Collective Stable is dedicated to ways of increasing efficiency in the rearing of cattle and growing of crops, as inspired by the Soviet model. Does the politically imposed nature of that model negate the validity of the information and techniques described, fastidiously illustrated here with timetables, calendars and diagrams? How much of the propounded “socialist organisation of work” is ‘socialism’, how much just ‘organisation’? The political standpoint from which ‘neutral’ facts or instructions are dispensed should be considered in any example of public information film (or public discourse in general); the overt, fearful and vanquished ideology of Stalinism simply makes such consideration harder to avoid.
Stalinist or communist ideology is of course on home ground amidst farming cooperatives and machine technology. The use of human subjects in the films just described, individualised only insofar as they provide wishful political models for the masses to follow, is equally appropriate to the collectivist and harshly normative system in which they were made. However, when portraying subjects like artists, inventors or even distinguished athletes, risks abound of endorsing individualism and elitism, of celebrating the exceptional and the bizarre at the expense of the ordinary, typical and practical. The films about art featured here sidestep such problems either by dealing with the collective, anonymous culture of folk art or by emphasising individual artists’ folk roots and their services to nation and liberation. The only film included about a then-living artist is Josef Lada, National Artist/Národní umělec Josef Lada (Hugo Huška, 1952), and to those familiar with Lada principally from his vivid and amusing illustrations for Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, it may be surprising to see the solemn treatment here, which paints Lada as a retiring man of the people, still devoted to his rural hometown. When inventors are dealt with, as in the pre-Stalinist Catch Up and Overtake/Dohnat a předehnat (Josef Vácha, 1948), they are valorised not as eccentric dreamers but as “sensible”, normal folk who try to solve “everyday problems”.
Yet not all politically off-message implications are sidestepped, and the films throw up a number of contradictions and antagonisms, even if these get resolved or simply go unapprehended. For instance, the vaunting of Czechoslovak achievements – industrial, sporting or cultural – pays due homage to the invigorating force of socialism but also often comes over as old-fashioned national pride. Automation in the Czechoslovak Automobile Industry/Automatisace v československém automobilovém průmyslu (Svatopluk Studený, 1957), which admittedly falls outside the high-Stalinist period, seems to chalk up local triumphs in car and motorcycle production less to a Soviet-led political context than to the specificity of golden Czech hands. Other films are more careful to conceal such pride with the correct political tenets. When the voiceover commentary of Emil Zátopek remarks that even small countries like Czechoslovakia can distinguish themselves in sporting achievements, this can be taken in a spirit of politically correct internationalism. But such sentiment also serves to let patriotism in by the back door, a patriotism stoked and satisfied by the dramatic reportage of Zátopek racing in the film’s second half.
Other films evoke the tensions inherent to Stalinist discourse. It is fascinating to see how certain films bridge the cheerful and the darkly paranoid faces of that discourse, as the reinforcement of a radiant and carefree optimism collides with a grave insistence on the need for constant vigilance and discipline. The aforementioned Defence Education, in which combat practice is turned into a humorous and lighthearted children’s outing, successfully fuses these dimensions to an extent that actually makes the film disturbing. By contrast, in Prepared (Připraveni, 1952), a film about the Svazarm camp for defence training, the tension is more palpably felt: the film starts breezily enough, with a practical joke played on one of the campmates by her peers, but as it shifts to the sterner imagery of well-disciplined marching bodies, the film’s jaunty accordion score strains to keep up the tone of youthful joie de vivre.
A significant number of films, especially those from the generally cinematically moribund years between 1950 and 1955, embrace their instructive or educative function in the most literal way. Most of the films here feature voiceover commentary, but some go so far as to include a professor-like figure who introduces a particular topic in front of a blackboard or slides – thus evoking and duplicating the manner of the films’ own presentation, which (as Česálková observes) often took the form of “blocks of short films” screened alongside a lecture (p. 4). But not all these films are so baldly pedagogical. To return to Prepared, the politics of this defence-themed film may be rigorously conformist, but it is also a cinematically interesting work whose opening – a seemingly deserted woodland scene in which a group of grinning youngsters emerge from behind skillful camouflage – favours wordless visuals and a pleasing touch of surprise over the usual forthright verbal exposition. Even the directly pedagogical style of address is not itself devoid of visual interest or variety. Several films, including the Vláčil-directed Electrical Injuries in Industry/Úrazy elektřinou v průmyslu (1950), accompany their instructional commentaries with charts, diagrams and animated tables – a language of visual models that may seem the natural formal expression of an official discourse committed to the rigid replication of models (economic, technical, behavioural).
If, frankly speaking, the Stalinist-era films are more generally both cinematically inhibited and rhetorically excessive, they do at times possess a level of inadvertent, one might even say paracinematic, interest, a sense of the films’ exhortatory and authoritative tone subtly undoing itself. In, say, How a Machine Helps People or In the Collective Stable, a sense of unfalsified human reality is present beneath the leaden instructional framing. In the films’ performers, these evident non-professionals chosen to propound or embody iron socialist certainties, one feels an authentic self-consciousness and awkwardness that ironically makes the films more engaging.
Predictably, though, the most cinematically arresting works here were made, in one way or another, beyond Stalinist control. The collection’s standout artistic achievement is unquestionably A Drop Too Much/O skleničku víc (1953), a stop-motion puppet film by the world-renowned team of Břetislav Pojar (who directs and co-writes), Jiří Brdečka, and Jiří Trnka. This film actually appeared within the Stalinist period, but more than one commentator has noted that animation enjoyed a surprising freedom even during the period of greatest repression, granted a unique degree of license by – among other things – its specific nature as a form, which for one thing makes the production process harder to monitor and for another demands to be considered as a language unto itself, exempt from the protocols governing live-action cinema (see Liehm and Liehm (1977, p. 110) and Hames (2009, p. 194]). That license may be evident in the fact that this film, unlike the others here, eschews the spoken word entirely. Instead this cautionary tale about the perils of drinking and driving is developed through the use of foreboding visual signs – the chalked outline of a body outside an inn, the bottle of beer branded with the name and image of “Devil” – and through a gripping and superbly composed fatal climax. As Eliška Malečková’s notes on the film suggest, this film is more “ballad” than lecture: it is the one that most easily transcends its instructional role (p. 17).
But for artistically dazzling work that is more than just the exception, one has to turn to the years 1948 and 1949 – a time before the Zhdanovite aesthetic doctrines that reigned throughout the early 1950s (fittingly, one of the key proponents of Czechoslovak Zhdanovism, culture minister Zdeněk Nejedlý, is a presiding presence in the 1952 inclusion Aleš’s Year/Alešův rok [Petr Schulhoff]). One of the major discoveries here is One, a Thousand, a Million/Jeden, tisíc, milion (Miroslav Hubáček, 1948), a panoramic account of preparations for the annual Sokol sports festival. What distinguishes this film from a later sport-themed work like Emil Zátopek is not so much its politics as the way it illustrates the unifying, peace-bringing power of sports through mastery of film technique. As the film juxtaposes arduous preparations from a wide range of different fields – from athletic practice to practical provisions like catering – it translates its vision of social unity and coordination into a visual play of patterns and formations. The alternation of camera angles and the controlled use of montage, which gets faster and faster as the action builds to the festival, creates an intensity that allows the viewer to also experience this sense of togetherness, to share in the common excitement of sports. The frenzy of activity then ‘breaks’ in the sudden silence and stillness of the opening of the event itself, to the accompaniment of a slogan of “life and peace”. This touch is both a striking sensory counterpoint and a powerful formal enactment of the pacifist message.
In other films from 1948-1949 it is the approach to commentary and narration that compels most interest. Valley of Peace and Health/Údolí zdraví a klidu (Kurt Goldberger, 1949), which depicts life in a health spa, is hardly ideologically unorthodox in linking the necessity of good health to the necessity of good work. But the narration adopts an engagingly humorous and personal tone as it takes us through the exemplary routines of its male protagonist – even hinting at a possible (though doubtless strictly hygienic) romance. More interesting still is People and Sausages/Lidé a párky (Pavel Blumenfeld, 1948), a survey of Prague café-going that bills itself as a “film feuilleton”. Perhaps the quirkiest film in the collection, People and Sausages takes a wittily self-reflexive approach, with the narrator’s commentary presented as a kind of practice run, a meditation on what form this as yet “half-finished film” should take. This film’s playfully self-questioning tone could not be more at odds with the authorial self-effacement and sense of hard certainty one expects of state-socialist rhetoric. It must be said that the film’s unorthodoxy of tone does not extend to its social judgements. The young men in zoot suits whom we see in one café are said to be “encountered only rarely due to [their] successful extermination by decent work”. Still, unlike the early-1950s films, this film does not exterminate such unconventional types from its own portrayal of society.
The latter half of the 1950s is relatively sparsely represented here – a sign, perhaps, that the exhortatory zeal and sense of purpose underpinning the earlier work started to wane after the two-year and five-year plan eras. The films from this period are not entirely lacking in the implicit utopianism nor the moral persuasion that characterised the Stalinist years, but they do indicate an ideological slackening, a turn from socialist construction to “socialist consumer culture” that is evident in the subject choices of food and drink, holidays and housing (Česálková, p. 13). These films also regain something of the visual richness of the films of 1948-49, especially in the scientific film Chemistry in the Kitchen/Chemie v kuchyni (Jan Calábek, 1956), with its beautiful and mysterious microscopic imagery, and in the charming animated fantasy Fruit Juices/Ovocné šťávy (Ludvík Hájek, 1959). This film’s magical conceit of a sprite-like creature strewing blossoming fruit trees in everyone’s path is not hard to read as an implicit vision of socialist abundance. Yet the film’s vivaciously coloured appeal, its simplicity of message and above all its extreme brevity (at one and a half minutes) also make it the closest thing here to straightforward ‘capitalist’ advertising.
Another diverting film from this period, Only a Quarter of an Hour?/Jen čtvrt hodinky? (Oldřich Mirad, 1956), reveals both continuities with the past and inklings of the cinematic future. This is a film promoting national tourism, but that of course means socialist-style tourism in which the emphasis is firmly on the importance of healthful physical activity (the film was in any case commissioned by the State Committee for Physical Education and Sport). In contrast to the faultless character types of the early 1950s, the human model here is a negative one in need of reconstruction – a snoozing middle-aged man who is whisked away by the power of dream on a series of hearty outdoor expeditions. Putting aside the exhortatory insistence on ‘correct’ forms of leisure, there are vaguely daring touches of fantasy here – at one point we see the main character dressed as a cowboy straight out of rodokaps popular fiction, accompanied by a scantily dressed ‘squaw’. Moreover, Mr. Vosáhlo, the flawed everyman protagonist, is a figure who anticipates the anti-heroes of Czechoslovakia’s 1960s New Wave, notably the couch potato fathers seen in Forman or Jaroslav Papoušek’s Homolka films. The latest film in the collection, Block of Flats/Domy z panelů (1959), is actually by a member of the New Wave, being a student short by Jiří Menzel, but this study of the construction of prefabricated housing blocks interestingly highlights the tenacity of certain well-worn communist tropes – notably the use of children to signify renewal and the promise of the future.
This is an admirably generous and well-selected collection that excavates a type of cinema that is usually beyond the pale of popular or even academic interest. Public information or instructional films occupy an obscure, negligible place in relation to feature production or more prestigious forms of ‘marginal’ filmmaking like animation, avant-garde cinema and auteur or ‘radical’ documentary traditions. If the latter are considered imaginative, personal and critical forms of cinema, the kind of films gathered here are easily seen at best as functional and aesthetically uninteresting, at worst as duplicitous and propagandistic. This collection is not without its tedious entries or those moments when the politics become obnoxiously overbearing. Yet these shorts from the early days of Czechoslovak communism are charged with imaginative power. In the most sophisticated examples, this is a matter of cinematic imagination, of artistry used in the service of instruction and persuasion. More generally this is the political imagination at work, kindling visions of an equal and abundant nation, the prospect of a transformed world. These imaginative visions may ultimately have been an instrument of repression rather than liberation, a means to conformity rather than critique, a way to mask rather than illuminate reality. But this does not mean they are not in themselves compelling or even seductive: like the most absorbing fiction, these exhortations to socialist transformation, even in their wildest optimism, possess a sense of possibility, a convincing ‘realism’ – for these are also films endowed with a more grounded spirit of post-war technological rationality. At the very least, these works remind us that imaginative fantasy may derive from nonfictional as well from fictional filmmaking, from collective national ambition – or state diktat – as well as from the individual artist.
Jonathan Owen
Courtauld Institute of Art
jonathan.lyndon.owen@gmail.com
Jonathan Owen is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester and has taught and researched at the Universities of Exeter and St Andrews. He is the author of Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (Berghahn 2011) and a contributor to various books including The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film 1916-1989 (Columbia 2014). His articles have appeared in such journals as Canadian Slavonic Papers, Iluminace, and Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
Hames, Peter. 2009. Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition. Edinburgh.
Liehm, Antonín J. and Mira Liehm. 1977. The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945. Berkeley.
McGahan, Katy. 2013-14. “Central Office of Information (1946-2012).” BFI Screen Online. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1207911/. Accessed on 12.8.2017.
Owen, Jonathan. 2016. Review: “Film – náš pomocník. České krátké filmy 50. let. Film – Our Helper. Czech Short Films of the 1950s.” Ghetto Films and their Afterlife (ed. by Natascha Drubek). Special Double Issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 2-3. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2016.0002-3.98
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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